Game, set and match

“For the past 10 years, I have been given a medicine called mildronate by my family doctor, and a few days ago after I received the ITF letter I found out that it also has another name of meldonium which I did not know…”

Should’ve gone to SciBite…

There’s been a lot in the news this week about Maria Sharapova’s failed drug test. The above quote in particular, caught our attention here at SciBite Towers.

SciBite’s best-in-class named entity recognition software can scan up to 1 million words per second for mentions of genes, diseases, drugs, adverse events, companies, and many more key biomedical terms and their associated synonyms.

Most importantly for Maria, this means it doesn’t matter to us whether her emails and documents from the World Anti-Doping Agency included the same drug written as “mildronate,” or “meldonium” or even “N-trimethylhydrazine-3-propionate”. We’d find them all! 

Ace!

A quick scan of the news using our SciNav annotator neatly demonstrates how our named entity recognition technology can be applied to identify terms from unstructured text documents.

Entities extracted from the text are displayed in the browser pop up and are linked to additional sources of information through their unique identifiers.

 

Advantage, Miss Sharapova

Once we have identified all the scientific entities in your text, it opens up a world of information for further research. Just take a look at some of the links that SciNav has discovered for Meldonium:

• ChEMBL
• ChemSpider (a database of > 43 million structures, properties, and associated information)
• Wikipedia

Articles picked up by SciBite highlight a number of research papers that could be used to back up Maria’s comments about other off-label uses for the drug. For example, Shotnikov et. al. (2013) states:

“Meldonium therapy showed positive effects in delaying the progression of dyslipidemia, diminishing insulin resistance, improving blood rheological properties, and suppressing chronic systemic inflammation.”

This is how the same article looks in our document browser, with all the key concepts highlighted: